


a single step, a hand outstretched

by rukafais



Category: Hollow Knight (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-08-22 19:03:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16603766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rukafais/pseuds/rukafais
Summary: "Ghost of Hallownest. Why do you look for me? Why do you shadow me so?" she says, her voice tight and quiet and needle-sharp.They can only answer with silence;Because I wantto belike youthe words die, never spoken.(No matter how tenuous the bond, they are family, after all.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Maybe if I write this my brain will quiet down and let me sleep
> 
> I am invested in these two messed up children getting some kind of happy connection in their lives ok

It follows her, even after she makes it clear she hunts alone. She sees it sometimes, lurking in the bushes or half-hidden by fungal growths.

It simply watches, which is the worst part. It has the stillness of a corpse, but one that still walks, and Hallownest has more than enough of those.

Once, to see how it will react, she sends her weapon flying into the undergrowth, where she last saw it. 

When she draws it back, there is still the faintest hint of shadow fading away on its blade, and she thinks that surely _this_ will drive it away.

(A strange regret twinges in her heart and she pushes it away. _No sadness in a weakling's demise_ , she tells herself fiercely. She is saving them from a fate worse than merely being killed.)

She doesn't sense it again for a while.

\---------

They follow her, quietly, as is their nature (as if they could really do anything not-quietly, as if they have a choice in the matter).

The needle cuts through the bushes they were hiding behind and leaves a cut on their shoulder, and they think, with a strange sort of determination burning inside them,

_I will just have to be better at hiding._

So they disappear, for a while, like the ghost she has named them to be.

They haunt Greenpath; they patiently study those chittering, camouflaged creatures that make their homes under leaf and vine and verdant grass. They watch with a studious intensity that might be worrying to an observer, if anyone had been around to watch a child with a ragged cloak and a bone-white mask staring at a bush that suddenly sprouts legs and walks away.

They briefly experiment with a leafy hat, before discarding the idea. Too noisy, they think. She would hear them instantly and their plan would be for naught.

Time passes. Leaves fall and grow and fall again.

They vanish, now on the hunt.

\----------

She barely gets warning this time, before something leaps upon her, a previously unregarded piece of scenery. She kicks it off and draws her needle and prepares to--

The abandoned vessel sits there, and though it has no possible way of expressing itself with a featureless mask, it seems to radiate...pride?

(The memory of her first hunt, her first prey, comes unbidden to her mind; how accomplished she felt, how happy to have done something so difficult! 

Roughly, she pushes it away. It is a vessel, a discarded, empty child. How would it know what such a thing feels like?)

Still it sits, and it looks almost...expectantly at her. Her eyes narrow to slits.

They stare at one another for a long moment before she realises how futile it is to stare down a thing that does not blink or even really have eyes, and she sighs.

"Don't think this means you've won anything, ghost!" she says sharply, and turns away. She has other places to be, things to check.

But out of the corner of her eye, before she turned her back on it, she could have sworn it was laughing at her.

\------

 _Got you,_ they think with quiet pride, and bask in the serene glow of a goal achieved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ambushing your sibling after she tries to shank you is sibling bonding right


	2. vacant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hornet feels some regrets. The Knight is..trying their best.

They don't remember anything; she's certain of that now. They hadn't recognised the other vessel, that empty and broken corpse. All they had seemed to feel, if there truly _was_ anything they could feel, was a kind of uncomprehending confusion and curiosity.

_It makes her terrible task the slightest bit easier to bear if she treats the vessels as prey, as obstacles, as instinct-driven husks with only a singular purpose. It was what they were made for, these cursed children._

_She finds their bodies scattered in a beast's lair. She leaves one pinned to an old monument at the point of their own nail. She stands there and accepts the weight of what she's done, and tries not to think about the fear they must have felt in their last moments._

_(she tries not to think about whether in their terror, their attempts to cling to life, they tried to call out for their father anyway)_

_It is better than torment and imprisonment, she thinks. She thinks it over and over. There are some things even she is reluctant to bear the weight of._

There is nothing for them here, but here they are regardless, yet again. She watches the tiny, horned figure sit in front of a lifeless body that looks so much like them.

They make movements with their hands she can't discern. They hold up little trinkets she can't quite make out the details of. They take their nail in hand and scratch at the ground, insistent and intent.

When they leave, and she is certain of their absence, she descends quickly to inspect the living vessel's handiwork.

Drawings of things the vessel has seen. Little gifts, strange rocks and plucked plants and polished shards of broken things left behind, strewn like offerings on a grave. An attempt from the living to communicate, no matter how futile, with the dead.

_In the candlelit chamber hung with banners, dusty with age and worn by lack of care, she sits and remembers when she was a little younger, when the wound of her mother's departure was fresher. She left glowing cuttings and trophies of her hunts; her voice filled the stifling silence with stories of her small triumphs, her exploits._

_Her grief had been raw and painful, something that demanded release, and for that she envies her past self, in a way. The lonely princess, the Gendered Child, had cried and expressed her pain, had been able to find respite in the outpouring of her tears._

_The steadfast guardian of Hallownest has no time to fall apart, and so sadness knots in her chest, a weight that crushes her heart until all she feels is exhaustion._

_(Don't cry. No more time for tears. They won't bring back what you lost.)_

She stands there at the grave, silent, reading the marks left behind. She lingers for a while, and then disappears as quickly as she came.

* * *

 

The Knight returns to the other vessel's resting place time and time again. If they notice that there are sometimes small things left that weren't there before, or that the plants have been trimmed back to stop them reclaiming the little grave, well

they don't indicate that they've noticed it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm tired but I can't god damn sleep so back to this


End file.
